ABSTRACT
The present investigation, based on acoustic, kinematic, and X-ray data, focuses on the use of vowel quantity for lexical distinctions in Gambian Wolof. This dialect has a contrast between two lengths and such a contrast occurs only in the first syllable, which is the lexically stressed syllable. The vowel is either referred to as being short or long and both short and long vowels are followed by a single consonant, i.e., VC vs. WC. The main questions addressed here are: (1) How will the phonological feature of quantity be reflected in the timing characteristics of acoustic and movement signals? (2) Will this distinction be further cued by differences in vocal tract geometry of sagittal profiles? (3) How robust will these vowel quantity linguistic distinctions be?
